Back to main newsNo democracy within EU
Fri 22 May 2009
Author: John FosterScotland's struggle for its own democratic institutions goes back well over a century. Ten years ago Scotland gained its parliament. Today most people want more powers and more democracy.
They see the existing Scottish Parliament as unable to tackle the key problems facing working-class communities - rising unemployment, deindustrialisation, overcrowding, dereliction and the constant erosion of public services.
And it was precisely this that inspired the Scottish labour movement's original campaign through the 1970s and '80s, plus the belief that a Scottish parliament could shelter Scotland from Tory privatisation.
The paradox is that this year, as the Calman commission and the Scottish government debate a new division of powers with Westminster, the wider constitutional framework that will govern both is being transformed for the worse.
By what?
No-one mentions it. But it's called the Lisbon Treaty.
There is good reason for the silence. All the main parties taking part in Scotland's "great conversation," or its non-SNP counterpart, are supporters of the European Union.
None has taken a stand on the Lisbon Treaty. New Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party back it.
Yet nothing could be more devastating for Scotland's democracy.
The Lisbon Treaty consolidates all the neoliberal, anti-democratic elements in previous EU treaties and gives them binding legal force.
It bans government action to aid manufacturing industry. It mandates privatisation of services. It incorporates the growth and stability pact that limits public spending. It privileges the rights of capital. It copper fastens the EU legal judgements which now outlaw industrial action whenever collectively bargained conditions are attacked by externally based employers.
So what is Scottish democracy worth within such a framework? The answer must be very little.
This is why the pro-EU parties, their leaderships captured by pro-big business ideology, are avoiding the issue. It is also why the intervention of the No2EU - Yes to Democracy platform in the EU elections is so strategically important.
As elsewhere, the platform has sought to bring together as wide an alliance of forces on the left as possible. It includes the transport union RMT, the Communist Party of Britain, Solidarity, leaders of the Indian community and other campaigning organisations.
Its members are realistic about what they can achieve. The alliance could and should have been broader. Its resources are slender. But its members are convinced of the importance of their task. It is to take back into the trade union movement and working-class communities the knowledge that Scottish democracy is incompatible with the current structures of the EU. The two don't fit. One or other will eventually be broken.
It is an intervention that is vital for two reasons. Positively, it is about reasserting the full sense of Scotland's democracy as fought for in the 1970s - that democracy is about collective power over capital or, as STUC general secretary Jimmy Jack put it in 1972, a Scottish parliament would be a "workers' parliament" because it would respond to the demands of working people.
Today that collective strength, already weakened, is mortally threatened by the EU's imposition of a constitution that privileges competition and the rights of capital and actively dissolves collective organisation.
Understanding this and relating it to the nature of capitalism holds the potential to restore the kind of politics fought for by the socialist pioneers of the Labour Party. Democracy only has substance when the exploited are organised.
Conversely, if this understanding is not taken back into the labour movement, it means colluding in a fake democracy not just in Strasbourg but in Westminster and Holyrood.
The consequences are already clear. The current scandals in Westminster show this. It opens the way for alienation, despair and fatalism and support for the extreme right.
In Scotland the Scottish Socialist Party or the Socialist Labour Party might claim they are already making this case. But there is a difference. And electors can see it.
An electoral intervention to assert the interests of a party is quite different from an alliance that subordinates party political interest to campaigning on a basic issue of working-class democracy.
The No2EU campaign team in Scotland displays this breadth of commitment. Its nominating officer is the former Labour MEP Alex Smith, who can speak from experience on the fake character of EU democracy.
Its chairman is Phil McGarry of the RMT, past president of the STUC, an internationalist who has helped lead the way in building solidarity with Palestine and Venezuela in Scotland.
Its press officer is Eddie McGuire, chairman of the Musicians Union in Scotland, a renowned classical composer, but also for many years chairman of the Scottish Campaign against Euro Federalism.
Team members include officers of the Indian Workers Association, who have helped to spearhead the fight against racism for two generations, and the secretary of the Scottish Tenants Organisation.
The list of candidates is equally broad. Tommy Sheridan of Solidarity led the poll tax campaign in Scotland, probably the biggest action of civil disobedience in recent history. Tommy Morrison of the CPB has been a pioneer in rebuilding links between community campaigning and trade union councils, of which he is secretary in Clydebank.
There is the student activist Leah Ganley, Ajit Uppal of the Indian Workers Party and former RMT Glasgow shipping branch secretary Stuart Hyslop, who campaigned against the EU-enforced attempt to privatise Scotland's still publicly owned ferries, Caledonian MacBrayne.
Their success will be measured not in votes - Keir Hardie did not get many in 1888 - but the lasting impact of their arguments.
Democracy and the present-day EU cannot be reconciled.
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